Hawaiian and West Indian humpbacks seem less unhappy to me than the whales off the coast of New England. Their songs are playful, staccato, lively. Violins, rather than oboes. When you see them diving and surfacing there is a certain grace, a feeling of triumph. Their slick bodies twist through a funnel of sea, reach toward the sky; with flippers outstretched, they rise from the pits of the ocean like the second coming of Christ. But the humpbacks in Stellwagen Bank sing songs that fill you to the core, that swell inside you. They are the whales with which I fell in love when I first heard the calls-eerie, splayed, the haunted sound your heart beats when you are afraid of being alone. Sometimes when I play the tapes of the Northern Atlantic stock, I find myself sobbing.
I began working with Roger Payne in 1969, in Bermuda, when he and colleague Scott McVay concluded that the sounds made by humpbacks- megaptera novaeangliae -are actually songs. Of course there is a lot of leeway in the definition of “song,” but a general consensus may be “a string of sounds put together in a pattern by its singer.” Whale songs are structured like this: One or several sounds make up a phrase, the phrase is repeated and becomes a theme, and several themes make up a song. On the average songs last from seven to thirty minutes, the singer will repeat the song in its same order. There are seven basic types of sounds, each with variations: moans, cries, chirps, yups, oos, ratchets, and snores. Whales from different populations sing different songs. Songs change gradually over the years according to the general laws of change; all whales learn the changes. Whales do not sing mechanically but compose as they go, incorporating new pieces into old songs-a skill previously attributed solely to man.
Of course, these are only theories.
I did not always study whales. I began my career in zoology lookingat bugs, then progressed to bats, then owls, then whales. The first time I heard a whale was years ago, when I had taken a rowboat off a larger ship and found myself sitting directly over a humpback, listening to its song vibrate against the bottom of my boat.
My contribution to the field was discovering that only the male whales sing. This had been hypothesized, but to get concrete evidence required some way of determining a whale’s sex at sea. Viewing the undersides of whales was possible but dangerous. Taking a clue from genetics, I began to consider the feasibility of cell samples. Eventually I created a biopsy dart, fired from a modified harpoon gun. When the dart hit the whale, a piece of skin a quarter inch thick was removed and retrieved by a line. The dart was covered with an antibiotic, to prevent infection in the whale. After many unsuccessful attempts I finally amassed a body of evidence. To this day, the only recorded singers in the whale community are male; no female has ever been recorded.
Twenty years later we know a lot about the varied songs of humpbacks but little about their purpose. Since the songs are passed down through generations of males and are sung in entirety only at the breeding grounds, they are seen as a possible method of attracting females. Knowing a given stock’s song may be the prerequisite for sex, and variations and flourishes may be an added inducement. This would account for the complexity of whale songs, the need to know the song currently in fashion-females choose a mate depending on the song they have to sing. Another theory for the purpose of the songs is attracting not females, but other males-acoustic swords, if you will, that allow male whales to fight over a female. Indeed, many male whales bear the scars of competition from mating.
Whatever the message behind the beautiful sounds, they have led to much speculation, and much information about the humpback whale’s behavior. If a whale is a member of a specific population, he will sing a certain song. Thus if the songs of each whale population are known, a singing whale can be traced to its origins no matter where the song is taped. Whale songs provide a new method of tracking whales-an alternative to tagging, or to newer photographic fluke identification. We can group male whales by the songs they sing; we can connect females to these groups by attending to the songs to which they listen.
This is my latest professional question: Should we be paying more attention to the individual singer? Won’t the personal histories-who the whale is, where he has been sighted, with whom he has been sighted-tell us something about why he sings the way he does?
I have conducted exhaustive research. I have been featured in Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times. Along the way I got married and had a child. After that, I never felt like I was giving enough time to my family or my career. In limbo, that’s what I call it. In limbo. Whales never sleep, you know. They are voluntary-breathing mammals, and have to constantly come up for air. They drift in the depths of ocean, unable to rest.
I used to try to mix the two. I took Rebecca and Jane on trackingvoyages; I played tapes of the New England humpbacks in the house, piping the melodies into the kitchen and the bathroom. And then one day I found Jane hacking at a speaker in the kitchen with a carving knife. She said she couldn’t listen anymore.
Once, when Rebecca was five, all of us sailed to Bermuda to observe the breeding grounds of the East Coast humpbacks. It was warm then, and Rebecca pointed at porpoises we passed on our way out to the reefs. Jane was wearing my rain gear-I remember this because there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but she preferred it to the goosebumps she got from the wet wind. She stood at the railing of Voyager, my hired boat, with the sun beating down on her hair, turning her scalp a shade of pink. She gripped the rail tightly; she never was firm-footed on the water. When we docked she’d walk with tentative steps to convince herself she was on solid ground.
Whales play. When we got to the exact spot and lowered the hydrophone into the ocean, there was a group of whales several hundred yards away. Although we were recording a whale singing way below the surface, we couldn’t help but watch the others. Their flukes slapped against the water; they rolled, languorous, stroking each other with their dorsal fins. They shot out of the water, ballistic. They slipped in and out of the waves, marbled in ebony, white.
When the melancholy notes of the whale’s song filled the boat, it became clear that we were watching a ballet, executed artfully, except we didn’t know the story being told. The boat pitched from left to right and I watched Rebecca grab Jane’s leg for support. I thought, My two girls, have they ever been so beautiful?
Although she was only five, Rebecca remembers many things from our trip to Bermuda. The whales are not one of them. She can tell you of the texture of pink sand; about Devil’s Hole, where sharks swim below your feet; of an estate’s pond with an island shaped the same as the actual island of Bermuda. She cannot remember her mother in yellow rain gear, or the slow-moving humpbacks that frolicked, or even the repeated cries of the whale below, to which she asked, Daddy, why can’t we help him? I don’t recall if Jane offered her opinion. In regard to whales, she has largely remained silent.